family affair
Night of the Hunter Chris Floyd finds some strange family values in American foreign policy
All in all, the Harken caper was pretty small beer when viewed against the Bush Family’s mammoth record of corruption, going back many decades, mixing politics and private profit with a cheerful amorality
78 ColdType | April 2014
T
he only article I ever had published in the Nation involved the offspring of a powerful politician trading on his White House connections to advance his private fortune. The piece was written 12 years ago, as the Enron scandal was breaking. (And boy, doesn’t that seem several centuries ago now, looking back over the vast flooded plains of blood and ruin that our bipartisan elites have bequeathed us since then.) It was a short article, dealing with the key role that the accounting firm Arthur Andersen had played both in the unfolding Enron morass in 2002 and the murky political machinations that kept George W. Bush from facing charges over what appeared to be a fairly flagrant – and highly profitable – bout of insider trading in 1990. That was when yet another Bush business was bailed out – yet again – by sugar daddies currying favor with his sour daddy in the White House; in this case, Harken Energy. Bush became a company director and member of the audit committee – then cashed out just weeks before Harken’s stock took a deep dive. The deal netted L’il Dub a cool $800,000+, while ordinary investors in the company took an acid bath. The hijinks were so blatant the SEC was forced to investigate but in the end declined to take “enforcement action” against the president’s son. However, as I noted in the article, the SEC made a point of declaring that
This [decision] “must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff’s investigation.” (Of course, this has never stopped Bush from claiming that he was “exonerated” by the SEC.) All in all, the Harken caper was pretty small beer when viewed against the Bush family’s mammoth record of corruption, going back many decades, mixing politics and private profit with a cheerful amorality that easily encompassed mobsters, tyrants, gunrunners, drug dealers, religious extremists, spies and, yes, the Nazis. I wrote a lot about this interesting history, and always found a ready audience on the left eager to see, rightly, the true face of American power – sleazy, greasy, brutal, cold – in the machinations of this clan of ruthless clowns. But I don’t think we will see an equal eagerness to pursue a very similar story that broke this week about the offspring of a powerful politician trading on his White House connections to advance his private fortunes. And unlike the Harken deal (although not dissimilar from many other Bush Family deals, including the one with German fascists), this particular piece of elite corruption could have – or is already having – deadly international consequences. We speak, of course, of the news that the son of the US Vice President, and the step-